The human ability to form large, coordinated groups is among our most impressive social adaptations. Larger groups facilitate synergistic economies of scale for cooperative breeding, such economic tasks as group hunting, and success in conflict with other groups. In many organisms, genetic relationships provide the structure for sociality to evolve via the process of kin selection, and this is ...

Kinship terms have been found to be highly diverse across languages. Here we investigated the brain representation of kinship terms in two distinct populations, native Chinese and Caucasian English speakers, with a five-element kinship identification (FEKI) task. The neuroimaging results showed a common extensive frontal and parietal lobe brain activation pattern for different kinship levels fo...

Kinship groups can have considerable importance (e.g., generational support, inheritance, and information for key life events). During demographic transitions, kinship networks are reshaped by changes in mortality fertility rates.

This exploratory qualitative study investigates the experiences of eight adults conceived following anonymous sperm donation who had discovered the identity both of their donor and of donor half-siblings, and had established contact with each other. It focuses primarily on participants’ reflections on genetic and social kinship relationships. Data were collected from this group as well as from ...

This review presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly variable effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales, and diverse cultures. Social cohesion is the ba...

We address a long hypothesized relationship between the proximity of individuals' dwelling units and their kinship association. Better understanding this relationship is important because of its implications for contact and association among members of a society. In this paper, we use a unique dataset from Nang Rong, Thailand which contains dwelling unit locations (GPS) and saturated kinship ne...

Many risks are present in rural developing economies: illness, weather, the sudden need to finance an investment opportunity, etc. Yet for many households in rural developing economies, consumption and investment are insured against short-term, idiosyncratic risks to a large extent, despite limited availability of formal banking and insurance products. The importance of kinship networks in faci...

OBJECTIVES Marriages among kin have the dual effect of both increasing average group relatedness as well as reducing the total number of kin by eliminating more genealogically and geographically distant individuals from kinship networks. Marriage decisions therefore face a tradeoff between density of kin, or formation of intensive kinship systems, and the diversity of kin, or extensive kinship ...